… arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide ….

[….]

“In 1968,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?

Nothing closed. Schools stayed open. All businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.

Stock markets didn’t crash. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses.

Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.

As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”

The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.

It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.

Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.

Was the difference that we have mass media invading our lives with endless notifications blowing up in our pockets? Was there some change in philosophy such that we now think politics is responsible for all existing aspects of life? Was there a political element here in that the media blew this wildly out of proportion as revenge against Trump and his deplorables? Or did our excessive adoration of predictive modelling get out of control to the point that we let a physicist with ridiculous models frighten the world’s governments into violating the human rights of billions of people?

Maybe all of these were factors. Or maybe there is something darker and nefarious at work, as the conspiracy theorists would have it.

Regardless, they all have some explaining to do.

By way of personal recollection, my own mother and father were part of a generation that believed they had developed sophisticated views of viruses. They understood that less vulnerable people getting them not only strengthened immune systems but contributed to disease mitigation by reaching “herd immunity.” They had a whole protocol to make a child feel better about being sick. I got a “sick toy,” unlimited ice cream, Vicks rub on my chest, a humidifier in my room, and so on.

They would constantly congratulate me on building immunity. They did their very best to be happy about my viruses, while doing their best to get me through them.

If we used government lockdowns then like we use them now, Woodstock (which changed music forever and still resonates today) would never have occurred. How much prosperity, culture, tech, etc. are losing in this calamity?….

Here is a marrying of some information that is a mix of May 1st info from the:

As of now there are almost 38,000 deaths attributed to The Rona, with almost 124,000 hospitalizations. Two years ago (2017-2018) the flu hospitalized 810,000 people, and 61,000 deaths (CDC). Adding this seasons flu and Rona stats, we are up to 90,000 deaths and a little above 600,000 hospitalizations. We are still under the articles totals above and under the the 2017-to-1018 totals. The only thing I note different is there is an ORANGE man in office. (Or, like the article states loosely, it could be a “perfect storm” of reasons, political opportunity being in the mix.) Trump even declared a state of emergency at the 49-death total count, Obama waited to the 1,000th death. I also imagine the combined totals of death from flu and The Rona will be smaller as there is crossover. The total death from each may never be fully realized in separating the two, but you get the point.

NEW: TUCKER CARLSON: A Chinese Research Paper Suggests The Coronavirus May Have Been Released Accidentally From A Lab (YOUTUBE VIDEO | HOTAIR)

NEW: REMINDER: Bernie Sanders Was Asked If He Would Close The Borders If He “Had To” To Stop The Spread Of Coronavirus (TWITTER VIDEO)

NEW: Right On Cue! Gov. Newsom Explains Why Pandemic Presents Opportunity To Usher In New ‘Progressive Era’ — And People Have Thoughts (TWITCHY)

NEW: CA Gov. Gavin Newsom: We Will Use Coronavirus to ‘Reimagine a Progressive Era’ (WEASEL ZIPPERS)

NEW: Laurence Tribe, Who Has Repeatedly Called Trump A ‘Dictator-Wannabe,’ Slams The President For Not Seizing Control Of Supply And Distribution Chain (TWITCHY) [Editor’s note: this is a good example of the degradation of language by Leftists. Words and ideas have certain meaning… except if you are a Democrat. rape, tolerance, aggression, racism, bigotry, etc… all have wild meanings to Democrats.]